Frederic Malle is sitting in the ELLE offices, surrounded on all sides by teetering stacks of magazines. He's flipping slowly through them, mumbling as he goes: "Skin...beach...color." Malle lingers, as any man would, on a shot from June 1986: leggy X-Men star Famke Janssen (long before Hollywood came calling) in Superwoman stance, a sunsoaked beach goddess in a sliver of tangerine Lycra, seemingly hitting the apex of postadolescent perfection at the exact moment of the camera's click. "I know what to do," he declares, thumping a mountain of magazines emphatically. "You need something very clear-cut with angles, colors. Very clean. Not a fur coat—a swimsuit."

With that, he stands, smooths his suit, and prepares to exit. Wait...that's it? In less than an hour, Malle—bona fide fragrance genius—has mentally distilled 25 years of ELLE into a two-sentence brief. This he will deliver to a perfumer, who will create "25," a special-edition birthday eau that, Malle promises, will somehow sum up who we are—and more to the point, who you, our faithful readers, are—and where we've been, with a sly nod toward where we're headed.

Malle calls himself a "perfume publisher." He comes up with a scent concept, assigns it to a perfumer, then culls and shapes the result. Ultraluxe and microniche, his scents, Les Editions de Parfums Frederic Malle—hot sellers at Barneys New York and his own boutiques in Paris and on Madison Avenue—are one part his inspiration, one part the perfumers' execution.

Malle is also terribly French, yet undeniably American—i.e., trés ELLE. He was grandfathered into the world of perfumery, literally; his maternal grand-pére, Serge Heftler-Louiche, launched Dior's fragrance arm. His mother also worked for the house and famously test-drove its potent Eau Sauvage on six-year-old Frederic; she brought the stuff home in liter bottles. As a teen, he consulted on packaging ideas for now-iconic Dior products. Such a well-scented child is likely to become a very particular kind of adult, and Malle lives up to his lineage. His suits—slim-cut and ever-so-slightly short—are custom-made at London's Anderson & Sheppard. Upon meeting, you would not be surprised if he gallantly kissed your hand (though die-hard fragrance fanatics, who classify him somewhere between Jesus and Mick Jagger, would likely drop
dead on the spot were he to do so).

For all his old-school ways, Malle has some of the most modern ideas in the business: His boutiques boast steel-and-glass "smelling columns"—round, sliding-door scent chambers that look as if Dr. Who might spring out at any moment, which keep the air in the shop untainted by spritzhappy testers. And, launched last year, his shiny red Fleur Mécanique electronic diffusers are the iPods of home fragrance.

When he was growing up in France, where ELLE has been published weekly since 1945, the magazine was such a staple that "I didn't know any girl or more mature woman who didn't buy it every week," Malle says. "It's incredible. My ex-girlfriends, lovers—everybody read it." The U.S. version, which launched soon after he came stateside to study art history at New York University, also made an impression. "It was colorful, bright, no-nonsense," he says, pausing. "Seriously heterosexual."

Still, magazines, rather uninspiringly, waft notes of ink and paper, maybe the odd perfume scent strip. ELLE is about ideas, words, images. How does a beach babe like Famke—and her mood, her moment—translate into molecules of scent?

Malle, true to form, answers this by referencing decadent nineteenth-century poet Arthur Rimbaud, whose sonnet "Vowels" assigned colors to letters: "A, black velvety jacket of brilliant flies...I, purples, spat blood, smile of beautiful lips...U, waves, divine shudderings of viridian seas." It's possible Rimbaud really did see letters in color. He was believed to have had synesthesia, a kind of gray-matter cross-wiring in which one sense is also perceived as another; someone with synesthesia may perceive colors in music or see tastes as shapes.

Malle says the process of translating abstract concepts into concrete scents relies on a similar ability. "I'm a very visual person; I smell in color," he says. "For instance, vanilla smells of yellow; amber's a bit brown; rose generally is a pale pink—but then there are so many roses." Perfumers are guided by the smells of flowers but also their physical characteristics: the milky, velvety sensation of a gardenia petal is somehow akin to its scent; the leaves of a fig tree feel like sandpaper and, in fact, smell astringently green—"the relationship there is made by your brain," Malle says.

Two months after his initial ELLE visit, Malle checks in with Bruno Jovanovic, the perfumer charged with making "25," at the Manhattan office of International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF), one of the top scent houses in the world. To understand why noses like Jovanovic are so tickled to work with Malle, a word on how most scents come about: Generally, a brand approaches IFF or one of its rivals, Givaudan—often both—with a brief that includes the desired spritz's target market, price, and market positioning. A team of perfumers at each house devises dozens of contenders; they then compete against each other to see which formula will ultimately be commissioned. Interestingly, the creative work is done on spec; only if the house produces the winning formula—and then uses its own raw ingredients, sourced from all over the globe, to manufacture it—does it make money. (In Jovanovic's case, some key wins include the recent Armani Idole and Calvin Klein's CK in2u for men.)

In contrast, perfumers love the rather old-world simplicity of being, as Jovanovic puts it, Malle's "writing hand." For Jovanovic, that means pixelating Malle's broad notion of the essence of ELLE—"comfort, sex appeal, precise colors...girls feeling good, really," Jovanovic says—into a series of scent-specific images. "What is the smell of sun? Of sea? Of skin?" he says. "What would red smell like?"

Malle and Jovanovic have already eliminated dozens of contenders; today they are down to two, code-named M and N, which have the same basic ingredients—bergamot, jasmine, rose, orange blossom, ylang-ylang, amber, and cedar—but in different proportions. To this editor—no scent expert, perhaps, but certainly a bit of an ELLEophite—they are both bright, beautiful florals; distinctly youthful, but not at all cloying. Neither is shy. But N has a little something extra. If you could bottle what Famke must have been feeling that day on the beach, this would be it—and any scent that could deliver even a whiff of that gets my vote.

But which will please the master? Malle leans back in his chair, paper scent strips stuck flowerlike between each finger. "Now," he announces, "we smell."

With enormous concentration, he moves methodically between the samples. He and Jovanovic lapse in and out of French and perfume-speak (technically English, but a language unto itself), discussing M's hint of cedar, which makes its musk "soft but not fuzzy." ("It's like the left pedal on the piano that shifts the sound.") But N holds his interest longer, due in part to a not-so-sexy sounding secret ingredient, the plant-derived chemical styrallyl acetate. "It reminds you of a very bright, almost solar floralcy," Jovanovic says. "It gives us the skin part, the warmth." Malle nods approvingly. "Yes," he says. "Now we have a bathing suit."

The ELLE fragrance, bottled.

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A "bathing suit" in which to bathe oneself—the bergamot, jasmine, rose, orange blossom, ylang-ylang, amber, and cedar bouquet of "25" is available at Editions de Parfums Frederic Malle, 212-249-7941